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Despite unanimously passing in both the House and Senate, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) do not have broad support outside of the Capitol. The two pieces of legislation are products of an 18-month investigation in which the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found a number of websites, most notably a site called Backpage.com, were being used as channels for sex trafficking. In response, FOSTA and SESTA aim to reduce sex trafficking by allowing victims to sue the online platforms that enabled their trafficking.

The true motivation behind FOSTA and SESTA is rooted primarily in an attempt to shut down the website Backpage.com, which was purportedly selling women and children online. Under these statutes federal law no longer views websites as platforms for content but as actual publishers of it—holding websites responsible for all third-party activity involving sex work or prostitution.

Levy's opposition to the legislation is supplemented by research indicating that a decrease in sex trafficking reports will not be because trafficking has abated, but rather because the legislation will have “forced victims into darker corners of the internet, where they are harder to find and recover.”

FOSTA and SESTA do not only represent an administration's attempt at controlling the internet, it is also represents the closure of smaller startup websites that do not have the financial, legal or social capital to withstand the repercussions for their user's illicit activities. Ironically, these acts are proving to hurt the very individuals they were supposedly intended to help.

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About the Author

Seth P. Chazin has aggressively defended clients in thousands of felony and misdemeanor cases for over 25 years. He has extensive experience representing criminal defendants in federal and state court, while handling both state and federal appeals as well.

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Abolish the Death Penalty

“The death penalty is a lie, a misguided mistake born of anger and frustration. Capital punishment has become a perverse monument to inequality, to how some lives matter and others do not. It is a violent example of how we protect and value the rich and abandon and devalue the poor. The death penalty is a grim, disturbing shadow formed by the legacy of racial apartheid and bias against the poor that condemns the disfavored among us, but corrupts us all. It’s the perverse symbol elected officials use to strengthen their ‘tough on crime’ reputations and distract us from confronting the causes of violence. It is finally the enemy of grace, redemption and all of us who recognize that each person is more than their worse act.”

“The death penalty is a lie, a misguided mistake born of anger and frustration. Capital punishment has become a perverse monument to inequality, to how some lives matter and others do not. It is a violent example of how we protect and value the rich and abandon and devalue the poor. The death penalty is a grim, disturbing shadow formed by the legacy of racial apartheid and bias against the poor that condemns the disfavored among us, but corrupts us all. It’s the perverse symbol elected officials use to strengthen their ‘tough on crime’ reputations and distract us from confronting the causes of violence. It is finally the enemy of grace, redemption and all of us who recognize that each person is more than their worse act.”
- Bryan Stevenson